Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas

The critically acclaimed debut novel from pioneering actress and writer Denise Nicholas tells the story of one young woman’s coming of age via the political and social upheavals of the civil rights movement. Nineteen-year-old Celeste Tyree leaves Ann Arbor to go to Pineyville, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964 to help found a voter registration project as part of Freedom Summer. As the summer unfolds, she confronts not only the political realities of race and poverty in this tiny town, but also deep truths about her family and herself. Drawing on Nicholas’ own involvement in the movement, Freshwater Road was hailed by Newsday as “Perhaps the best work of fiction ever done about the civil rights movement.”

Entertainment Weekly

Along with segregationist terrors (beatings, night shootings, a church torching), Celeste sustains hard blows in learning long-held secrets about her past.Before her summer is up in this resonant story, she finds herself ''in a life and death struggle for a place called home.''
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